Playlist: iTunes 7.2 Disallows Buy-Burn-Rip DRM Loophole

Christopher Breen:

If you burn a playlist of iTunes’ protected music to a CD in iTunes 7.2 and then rip that CD in the MP3 format (a trick people often use to remove the tracks’ copy protection), those MP3 tracks won’t copy to an iPod. Try, and you’ll be told that the tracks are incompatible with the iPod.

This is not an issue with earlier versions of iTunes.

Boy, is that shitty. The workaround is to burn the CD to MP3 using software other than iTunes. I wonder how iTunes is identifying these CD tracks? Maybe this is just a bug?

Update: Apparently the problem only occurs when you try to rip to MP3 format, specifically — if you rip from CD back to plain (non-DRM) AAC, it still works just fine. This really sounds like a bug, not a deliberate limitation.

★ Friday, 1 June 2007